These are Winston Churchill’s
words. One of the “victors”, who saw that the myriad of rival nations and
states had come perilously close to bringing back the Dark Ages “in all their
cruelty and squalor”. Churchill’s remedy
for this situation was simple, and shared by many others: stop being a myriad
of rival nations and states. Become a community, in Churchill’s words “a kind
of United States of Europe”.

Since then, a full seventy years,
there has been no armed conflict (plenty of bickering, but no armed conflict)
between any members of the European Union or its predecessors. That was not the
case in the previous seventy years. Or the seventy years before that. Or before
that. As we go back and back trying to find a comparable period of peace in
Europe we find we run out of recorded history.

We have for seventy years lived
together. We have welcomed into our union former fascist dictatorships,
Portugal, Spain, Greece and kept them democratic. We have converted the former
communist economies to the free market, their dictatorships to democracies and
we have kept them that way. Our lives, commerce and societies are so
intertwined that the dictatorships, wars and grinding poverty of previous
generations have become utterly inconceivable.

In doing so we have dismantled
barriers to trade, both in goods and services. You used to have to clear
customs to sell abroad, there used to be tariffs on the import and export of
goods, there used to be out and out bans on the export of services. Regulations
varied from state to state; what one could quite legally sell in France could
not be sold in Germany, what could be sold in Germany was against the law in
Spain.

We co-operate. The Costa del Sol
used to be known as the Costa del Crime; criminals could retire to Spain and be
entirely safe from the British Police. Now there is the European Arrest
Warrant. If a dangerous criminal flees to Spain, Plod simply ‘phones el
Plod and el Plod picks up the criminal for us. The Large Hadron Collider is
just the most famous example of a European scientific project. It is not too
much of an exaggeration to say that scientific research is not now a national
but a European endeavour. Many environmental projects are nigh on impossible
without co-operation: pollution and global warming does not acknowledge
borders.

Employment law requires
co-ordination over the Union. All must provide holiday, sick pay, maternity pay
lest a “race to the bottom” begins where one jurisdiction sees and advantage in
screwing over its workforce leaving the others to follow suit or become
“uncompetitive”.

Peace, prosperity, democracy,
liberty, security, progress and a decent life for the citizens.